The proliferation of integrated circuits has placed increasing demands on the design of digital systems included in many devices, components, and architectures. The number of digital systems that include integrated circuits continues to steadily increase and may be driven by a wide array of products and systems. Added functionalities may be implemented in integrated circuits in order to execute additional tasks or to effectuate more sophisticated operations in their respective applications or environments.
Current computer processors that are associated with integrated circuits have a number of input-output (I/O) pins that dissipate a significant amount of energy. Many of the I/O pins are dedicated to interfacing to external memory chips through instruction address and data address buses or a multiplexed bus, which can be used for both data and instruction addresses. The amount of energy dissipated from the I/O pins can be significant when compared to the total chip power consumption. In addition, a given communication channel (e.g. a bus) may suffer from wear and tear degradations and inadequate bit error rates. These deficiencies provide a significant challenge to system designers and component manufacturers who are relegated the task of alleviating such problems.